EconTech

I haven’t had a chance to check any of this stuff out in any kind of detail. But someone was kind enough to forward this post that gives a quick review of many of the linux-native (aka not web browser based) solutions. As I move to using LaTeX more, BibTex is looking like it may be my product of choice. We’ll have to see what kind of options there are. Also, it looks like someone has gotten EndNote working under Wine, something that I could not do last time I tried.

Edit: I should note I also saw Pybliographer. It is tempting to try out, simply because it is written in Python, which should make customization pretty easy.

Linux Reference Mangement

I’m getting a lot of hits regarding reference management under Linux, especially CWYW and EndNote related. While it is entirely possible to run both EndNote [details] and Microsoft Word [details] under Linux, I suspect that connecting the two together is rather more difficult. I might try this one day.

I have, however been looking at other options, as I mentioned in a previous post, openoffice.org have been working on a bibliography tool, the details of which can be found on this page: http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/ What I didn’t realise was that OpenOffice already has rudimentary bibliographic tools; they aren’t that impressive, but they are there (and were there long before the Microsoft Word bibliographic tools (new in Office 2007)).

Personally, I don’t like the feature creep in OpenOffice, Microsoft Office and their counterparts. I am a firm believer in the old UNIX philosophy: make programs that do one thing well, something that none of these suites can be accused of. [Deleted text: See comments for background]

It should be noted that OpenOffice’s bibliographic project seems to ignore the core issue of reference management: re-use. In the outline of the project tasks, task three reads:

Storage of document bibliographic data in the OOo document save package and the code changes necessary to read and save that bibliographic data.

What this seems to mean is embedding the bibliographic data for a document into the document itself, which might sound like a good idea until you consider that the majority of sources that are worthwhile citing are worthwhile citing again. An embedded approach entails a view of reference management that is incompatible with re-use, whereas the old-fashioned external database approach — for example, EndNote, the old OpenOffice approach — allows re-use. The issue here is that an external reference management system does one thing well, rather than trying to embed functionality into an already overloaded wordprocessor.

There is also a conceptual problem with both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice:

Reference management has little to do with citation

I believe that reference mangement centres on the concepts ‘reference’ and ‘management’, not ‘citation’. Yes, one of the reasons we use reference management systems is to keep references to all our cited materials handy, but the reference data is important in more respects than just ‘citation’: we can save other metadata — data about the reference — that helps us see what the reference is and why it is important; we can choose to sort and view references to get an overview; we can see what works we have been citing; and we can re-use references in new contexts (and yes, this does mean (re-)citation).

This leaves us with programs like (and there are others):

• EndNote
• Reference Manager
• JabRef
• Zotero
• BibTex
• Bibus
• GetARef
• B3

Of these, B3, Bibus, Jabref and Zotero work out-of-the-box on *NIX. Note that I haven’t included the web-based offerings such as EndNote Web, CiteULike and RefWorks here — they are another kettle of fish altogether.

Reference Manager can possibly be run under Wine in the same way as EndNote, but note that I haven’t managed this. I have included it here for one reason, which I return to below. I’ve never tried GetARef, so I can’t give a full description of how that would function under Linux.

I have used EndNote on Linux for some time now, in fact I don’t really “use” it, in the sense that I only really provide “support” for it — so that users have someone to ask when they can’t get things working on their own machines. EndNote on Linux saves me re-booting (and means that I can work on connection files / import filters / styles in their default location, something that standard Windows “(mis-)managed-client” privileges prevent).

I have used BibTex, which is just great if you’re working in LaTeX. One of the things that I really like about BibTex is that it is very flexible, and plain text-based — which comes as something of a relief after certain commercial products’ insistence on binary formats interspersed with bits of plain text.

I have also used JabRef and Bibus, and these are really great. JabRef is a Java program and requires Sun’s Java Runtime, but little else. It provides a simple interface for maintaining BibTex databases. Installation is simple, and the functionality is “getting there”. You could easily become reliant on this program if you use LaTeX, and it comes highly recommended.

Bibus is a very good choice if you use OpenOffice.org. While it isn’t properly integrated in OpenOffice (the CWYW-alike feature only seems to link from Bibus, and not from OpenOffice back to Bibus — although there is a workaround for this by importing the Bibus database into the bibliographic sources in OpenOffice), it really is very good. One caveat though — it is seemingly tricky to get it to run properly, but this just seems to be the case — I used a debian package, and everything was in fact working, I just didn’t realise it. I get the impression that a few loose ends need tidying up before you get the one-click feeling you expect from Linux — ha ha. I also get the impression that things are not quite so easy on Windows.

The really great thing about Bibus is that it gives users a really exciting prospect: shared databases — and here we’re back to Reference Manager, as these are two few reference management tools that allows multiuser, networking — in the case of Bibus, not only on local networks, but also on the Net. Hurrah. A problem that I see with Bibus is that it doesn’t make space for the place of publication, but then again neither do the minimalist versions of ISO 690 or Dublin Core.